Setup Virtual Printers for Student iPads Using Printopia

Printopia offers virtual printers that allow students to send iPad content to a folder on a teacher's Mac, Dropbox, or Evernote account. Printopia's virtual printers are great solutions for classroom workflows. Click the + button at the bottom of your printer list in Printopia on your Mac to view these virtual printer options:

Send directly to a folder on your Mac. Create a Send to Mac virtual printer to save/print a PDF copy of a document, or a JPEG or PNG version of an image, to a folder on your Mac. You can add unlimited Send to Mac virtual printers.

Let’s say that you want to collect some Pages documents from student iPads. Open Printopia and create a folder on your Mac let’s call it Pages Assignments. Click the + symbol under the printers in your Printopia dialog on your Mac and select the virtual printer Save to Folder on Mac.

Select the Pages Assignments folder you just created. Now students can send their documents right on to your Mac in a folder ready for your review.

Keep your files organized by configuring multiple virtual printers with different save destinations. For example, set up one folder as a virtual printer on your Mac to collect the history project students are submitting. Set up another folder and virtual printer for the science assignment, and so on. In that way, student submissions will be neatly organized in separate folders on your Mac.

Send directly to an application on your Mac. You can send a copy of any content file on your iPad to your Mac and have it opens within a designated application.

For example, suppose you are constantly taking screen shots and pictures on your iPad, and further suppose that you often need to touch them up in a photo editor. Using Printopia, you can create a virtual printer that sends a file directly into Adobe Photoshop on your Mac.

Tap the + sign in under the printer list in the Printopia dialog, and select Send to Application. Select Adobe Photoshop as the application, and that’s it. You now have a virtual printer that will send an image to your Mac and open it automatically in Photoshop!

Send files directly to your Dropbox or Evernote account. Add a virtual printer to send content to your Dropbox folder. You can even designate which folder in Dropbox to use. Once sent to your Mac’s Dropbox folder, the content is synced to your online account and all your other devices that use Dropbox.

Do you need to save expense receipts? Take a quick picture and send it to an Expenses folder you created on Dropbox. Having a special day at your child’s soccer game? Create a folder and send the photos directly to it for easy organization and archiving.

Password-protect your folders: Worried about junk? Every physical and virtual printer you share in Printopia can be configured with password security. Even if someone has access to your wireless network and can therefore see your shared printers, he or she can’t print or save files to your Mac without knowing and using a specific password.

Printopia has done a wonderful job of satisfying users who still require some amount of paper printing while also offering a host of virtual printer options for organizing and working with digital content.